CIVIC LEADERS SERIOUS ABOUT PLAY BENEFIT.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

They all seem like decent, upstanding citizens: the City Council members, the executive at the amusement park, the Chamber of Commerce representative, the state assemblyman, the school board member.

But tonight one of them might turn out to be the villain and another the victim, as some of the Santa Clarita Valley's best-known civic leaders will ham it up for charity in a staged murder-mystery.

``Murder Buys the Books,'' a fund-raiser to benefit the Los Angeles County library branches in Canyon Country, Newhall and Valencia, will begin at 7 p.m. at the Valencia Library, 23743 W. Valencia Blvd. Tickets cost $35 and are on sale at each branch.

The whodunit will be a puzzle not only for the audience but also for all of the 20 cast members - except, of course, the one tapped to play the killer, said Jan Scheuermann, whose Lancaster-based business, Deadly Affairs, stages audience-participation murder mysteries.

Even the victim won't know who is going to ``whack'' him or her in the play, called ``An Engagement With Death.''

Among the participants will be Santa Clarita City Council members Jo Anne Darcy, Frank Ferry and Laurene Weste; Assemblyman George Runner, R-Lancaster; school board member Gloria Mercado from the William S. Hart Union High School District; former Santa Clarita Mayor George Pederson; Tim Burkhart, vice president of operations for Six Flags California; Marlee Lauffer and Carol Maglione, spokeswomen for The Newhall Land and Farming Company; and Cameron Smyth, deputy chief of staff for state Sen. W.J. ``Pete'' Knight, R-Palmdale.

Smyth and Lauffer play two of the leading roles in the murder mystery, as a socialite couple whose engagement party is being held in the library. Their characters are the children of two business partners who started a lingerie business, W & P Foundations, that struck it rich with their invention of the underwire bra.

The murder mystery's actors have no lines to memorize - rather, Scheuermann provides each cast member with background information on his or her character.

Actors arrive one hour before curtain time, and only then will they receive brief individual scripts that tell them the cues for their entrances and exits, the type of dialogue and action they should perform - and whether they are the predator, the prey or a bystander, Scheuermann said.

``They will get a script that will tell them where to be and when. It says, for example, tell your boss that somebody is selling company secrets,'' she said.

``They can say (the lines) 100 different ways. We want them to come off sounding natural,'' Scheuermann said. ``That's also why we don't rehearse, because it would probably look very stilted.''

Most of the actors will rummage through their own closets to put together their costumes. Scheuermann said she generally likes to cast actors against type so the line between make-believe and reality is not at all blurred for the audience.

But the primary casting consideration is to match extroverts with the more flamboyant roles. ``It helps to be a little bit of a ham,'' said Scheuermann, whose company writes, directs and produces murder mysteries for parties, charity functions and corporate entertainment.

Even those whose tendencies are more that of a shrinking violet get into the spirit of the occasion, she said. ``It really brings people out of their shell, because when they play a character, it's like wearing a mask at Halloween. They're doing it for a good cause, not because they're hams,'' she said.

And if any of the cast members freezes up in front of the audience, Scheuermann and her assistant will be close by, playing a homicide investigator and a deputy, and able to give some subtle stage direction.

``I tell the actors before they go out, if anything happens, if you forget a line, come find me,'' Scheuermann said. As can be expected with amateur thespians, there tend to be gaffes that must be righted later in the script, which she said was created to be flexible.

Getting the storyline back on track can be done seamlessly, without the audience becoming aware it ever veered off course. ``I've had murderers confess to the crime two minutes into the investigation,'' Scheuermann said. ``At the end of the evening, I had only four people vote to convict the murderer, even though they had confessed.''

Sometimes, the intended victim misses his or her cue. ``The body isn't there. The person who was supposed to be killed decided they want to live a little longer,'' Scheuermann joked.

The fund-raiser is sponsored by the Santa Clarita Valley Friends of the Libraries, a 230-member volunteer organization that provides the three local branches with materials and supplies unavailable from the Los Angeles County public library system, said Vice President Chris Campbell.